unix script that handles dates

I have a comma delimited text file that has a date field that looks like:
12/1/2011 04:00:00 PM

I only want to include records that are 10-40 days from now. So in this example, I'd want to include dates between 12/10/2011 and 1/10/2012. Is there a linux command or a scripting language that can easily handle this type of situation? Thanks.

Re: unix script that handles dates

The GNU 'date' function can do some pretty clever things - you could certainly pull in the date strings and convert them to some unambiguous format (e.g. +%s seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC) and then do a direct integer comparison